Eventually, the agony was over.
‘Thank you and goodnight,’ she said after the last song, ‘The End’ by The Doors.
And that was that. No one applauded; the remaining guests finished off their drinks and wandered out into the night. A thick cloud of weariness hovered just below the ceiling.
It’s the heat, Lisa thought, but she knew that wasn’t true. There’s no atmosphere in a half-empty club. She gathered up her records, finishing just as the last guests left the room. But before she could follow them, Kent Kloss came over.
‘Hi, Summertime. Need any help with your bags?’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’
She shook her head firmly, but he followed her up the stairs anyway. They emerged into the warm air and headed for her Passat. A small black shadow flitted past across the night sky – a bat, hunting for insects.
‘Are you behaving yourself?’ Kent said when they reached the car.
‘Absolutely. I’m being positively angelic.’
‘Keep it up. Don’t do anything stupid.’
Kent seemed to be stone-cold sober, but he had stopped smiling when they left the club.
‘At least we’ve been lucky with the weather this summer,’ he said. ‘Everything else has gone to hell in a handcart, but the sun is shining.’ He looked over at the brightly lit hotel and added, ‘Eight pallets of vodka and Russian champagne … Know anyone who might be interested?’
Lisa shook her head. ‘How come?’
Kent smiled wearily. ‘That’s how much we’ve got left. Eight pallets, unsold. We had a major delivery by ship at midsummer, but we’ve sold only half the amount I’d calculated. It was the gastroenteritis … We’d have earned two million this summer, tax-free, if he hadn’t added water polluted with dung to our system.’
Lisa didn’t reply; she just looked at her watch. It was gone two o’clock. ‘I have to go,’ she said.
Kent moved a step closer. ‘Has she spoken to you?’
Lisa unlocked the car. ‘You mean Paulina? Yes, she has.’
‘And you’re in?’
‘That depends.’
‘On what?’ Kent’s voice had a harder edge now.
Lisa knew she had nothing going for her, but decided to give it a try anyway: ‘Then can I go home?’
‘You can go home if you do this,’ Kloss said, ‘or wherever the hell you like. I won’t go to the police. No one will come looking for you.’
Lisa nodded. ‘OK. What do I have to do?’
‘I want you to watch. I want you to keep watch on Villa Kloss, you and Paulina. Aron Fredh is bound to turn up there, I’m certain of it … and you know what he looks like.’
‘And what will you be doing while we’re keeping watch?’
Kent opened the car door for her and leaned closer. ‘I will be setting the trap.’
Gerlof
The telephone in Gerlof’s room rang after coffee time on Friday morning, and he picked up the receiver with a certain amount of trepidation.
‘Davidsson.’
‘Gerlof?’
He recognized both the voice and the accent. It was someone who had come back home to Öland, but not the person he had been hoping to speak to.
‘Good morning, Bill,’ he said. ‘How are things in Långvik?’
‘Fine, but it’s time to say goodbye. The summer is over … I’m heading back to Michigan tomorrow.’
‘That’s a shame. My boat isn’t quite ready yet.’
‘In that case, we’ll have to take her out next summer.’
‘Maybe,’ Gerlof said. ‘If I’m still here.’
Bill laughed. ‘We’re going to live until we’re a hundred, Gerlof.’
‘Look after yourself, Bill.’
‘I always do,’ the American said. ‘By the way, did you get hold of that guy you were looking for?’
‘Yes, I found him. But it turns out he didn’t actually come from the USA; he was in the Soviet Union.’
‘Oh yeah? What was he doing there?’
‘Who knows? … But I suppose he believed in a better future in the workers’ paradise.’
‘I guess so,’ Bill said. ‘Like Oswald.’
‘Oswald who?’
‘Lee Harvey Oswald. He went to the Soviet Union at the end of the fifties, then changed his mind and came back home with a Russian wife and a young daughter.’
It took a few seconds before Gerlof remembered the events in Dallas. ‘You mean the assassin,’ he said.
‘That’s right, the gunman who shot JFK,’ Bill said. ‘But I don’t suppose your guy is planning anything quite so terrible.’
‘Absolutely not,’ Gerlof said, feeling anything but certain.
The Homecomer
Aron was sitting right at the top of his new hiding place. He had made himself at home as best he could, with blankets and a thin mattress, and he had slept well for the last few nights.
He felt safe, strangely enough, like an eagle in its nest at the top of a tree. He could see out towards the bay and the Sound, and inland as well.
This evening there were fluffy white clouds scudding in across the island. Some of them resembled human heads, others distorted monsters.
He could see the children gathering on the shore for their swimming lessons and holidaymakers running along the jetty and jumping into the water, from morning till night.
He could see cars coming and going.
He noticed that some visitors had already started shutting up their summer cottages, getting ready to head back home to the mainland.
The sun would carry on shining for a long time, but summer in the holiday village was almost over.
He gazed out across the Sound. The waves were tipped with white this evening, licked by the wind. The sea was immense and powerful, constantly moving.
Aron’s dream was to die here by the Sound. He wanted to look out across the water, then close his eyes, with peace in his heart. And perhaps it would happen, if he stayed close to the sea for the time he had left, and kept away from his enemies until it was time to face them.
He would be ready. Everything was prepared.
Slowly, Aron began to climb down from the tower, past his bed on the ground floor, out through the door and down the steps. His car was hidden among the trees a short distance away.
He was heading up to Marnäs for one last conversation with Gerlof Davidsson.
The New Country, 1940–45
The war against the counter-revolution has been long and hard, and Vlad is very tired.
So many are gone now. Denounced and condemned. There is a constant insistence that every enemy who is unmasked must give the names of more enemies, who in turn give even more names, like an ever-growing mill wheel.
They have crushed so many.
Trushkin has been shot.
Teachers and scientists have also been shot.
Homosexuals and soldiers have been shot.
Poets, porters and priests have been shot.
So many.
Captain Rugajev, Vlad’s first commanding officer at Kresty, was removed by Zakowski, the top man in Leningrad. Zakowski was then shot by Jagoda, the NKVD Chief of Police; the following year, Jagoda was executed by his successor, the vodka drinker Nikolai Yezhov, a bloodthirsty individual who soon ended up in Lubyanka Prison, condemned to death by the new leader of the NKVD, Lavrenti Beria.
Vlad’s new commanding officer at Kresty has survived for several months in his post. His name is Karrek, and he is a hard-bitten old soldier from the First World War. Major Karrek doesn’t say much, but he always carries a little notebook with him. It is said that he jots down any rumours about his men. Karrek continues to administer the ultimate punishment under the law down in the cellar, often by his own hand.
Trucks trundle away every night, transporting the bodies to a military area outside the city. Vlad has heard that enormous excavators are needed to dig mass graves big enough to accommodate all the corpses.
To think that there were so many enemies, so
many traitors.
Vlad is certain that no one suspects him of being a Trotskyite, or an imperialist, or any other kind of traitor to his country. He is loyal to Stalin, to the Party and to his commanding officer; he is no enemy of the state.
He is clean.
And yet. The fear and the doubts are there when he goes to bed, and the walls press in around him. What is Karrek writing down in his notebook? Vlad is terrified of turning up at work one day and being met by evasive glances, by the realization that no one is calling him ‘Comrade’ any longer. After all, he was once a foreigner, and sometimes he isn’t completely convinced that he is not a spy.
He remembers his friend Vladimir, and the question he asked up in the north when Aron said he wasn’t a spy: ‘Are you sure?’
Is he? Aron sees what goes on in the cellar, he notices and remembers everything – doesn’t that make him a kind of spy? Perhaps he is spying for some foreign power that has yet to get in touch with him. If Sven was a spy, perhaps Sven’s secret plan was to place Aron in the Party, so that other agents would be able to contact him later.
These dark thoughts always come at night, when he is lying in his bed. He sees bloody faces floating in the darkness, he listens for the sound of knocking. He waits for the sound of a car stopping outside the building, for footsteps hurrying up the stairs. Loud banging on the door, like knuckles against a coffin lid.
There are sometimes footsteps in the stairwell, but so far no one has come to his door.
What can Aron do, while he waits?
Nothing. He just has to let Vlad get on with his work. Day and night, nothing but work.
On 4 May 1940, Vlad is called into Karrek’s office. The major is sitting at his desk with his notebook in front of him. He gives a brief nod.
‘Come forward, Jegerov.’
Vlad steps up to the desk. He notices a bowl of pickled gherkins, but Karrek doesn’t offer him any. He merely leans back and studies Vlad. ‘How are you?’ he says.
‘Very well, Major.’
Karrek adjusts his cufflinks. ‘I have been called to Moscow to serve in Lubyanka Prison. I am to take over as the commandant. It is a great honour. I need to take a number of men with me, and I have selected the very best.’
At first, Vlad doesn’t understand, but then he stands to attention.
Three months later, Major Karrek is transferred to Moscow. He takes Vlad and two others with him to the capital.
They arrive in a city where a certain air of calm has descended after all the trials and purges. There is far less suspicion, and everyone seems relieved that the threat of war has been removed, now that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany have become allies.
Perhaps the future has arrived, Vlad thinks. At long last.
The summer of 1941 is scorching. Aron finds it oppressive, as if a thunderstorm is coming. And the storm breaks at midsummer.
On 22 June, Hitler invades the Soviet Union in a lightning attack that sweeps aside all opposition. Polikarpov aircraft are shot down by swarms of Messerschmitts. German Panzer divisions advance across the wheatfields of the Ukraine.
The railway line between Leningrad and Moscow is cut on 21 August. Kiev falls on 26 September.
Aron cannot go home to Sweden now, not even if he is granted safe conduct by Stalin himself.
He is trapped in a country where, for the first time, everyone is affected by the war. There is no bread. Sugar is rationed, so is soap.
A quarter of the population joins the Red Army, but they are unable to drive back the fascists. During 1941 alone, the Soviet Union loses almost three million soldiers.
At the end of October, the Germans are outside Moscow. Kalinin in the north and Kaluga in the south have already fallen. Shops and abandoned apartments are looted. Moscow’s sixteen bridges and Stalin’s dachas are mined. Stalin himself prepares to leave Moscow, but on 18 October he eventually decides to stay and sleep on an underground train.
General Zhukov assures him that the city can be held.
The NKVD is given free rein to execute deserters and workers who attempt to flee. Vlad is one of those operating out in the streets, just behind the fortifications.
The German army stops to rest and to prepare the final onslaught on Moscow, which is a mistake. Four hundred thousand well-rested Soviet troops, together with a thousand tanks and a thousand planes are on their way from the Far East on special trains. They arrive at the end of October, and gather outside Moscow.
At the beginning of November, Stalin holds a military parade in the besieged city in order to stiffen the resolve of his people and to boost morale. Vlad helps to carry chairs from the Bolshoi Theatre for members of the Politburo. He hears the leader give an inspiring speech about the defence of the mother country, with music provided by the NKVD ensemble.
That night, the temperature drops to arctic levels as if to order, and in the middle of November Zhukov launches a counter-attack. On 5 December, the Red Army manages to stop the progress of the Germans.
Slowly, the war turns for the Soviet Union, but the cost is incalculable. Over eight million Soviet troops perish in the conflict. In addition, almost ten million civilians die of starvation or in Nazi massacres.
The NKVD is reorganized after the war. The prison service is placed under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the MVD, while counter-espionage and the hunt for class enemies becomes the remit of the Ministry for State Security, the KGB. Vlad moves to the KGB.
Moscow gradually begins to thaw out after the winters endured during the war; there is more food, and people have more time to enjoy themselves. Vlad has been living in the same small apartment for five years now, in a block for employees of the state. There is a communal bathroom, but he has his own kitchen. He is not well paid but has been able to buy himself a car after the war, a brown Pobeda. He goes on several outings, but never to the north. Never to the place where the old camps lay.
When he has a free evening, he sometimes goes to the Bolshoi. He chooses the cheapest seats right at the back, and watches a play or a ballet.
Vlad often has to work at night, long shifts of twelve hours or more at the prison on Lubyanka Square. In recent years, a dirty stream from the great flood of the war has poured into Moscow’s prisons: defeated officers, German scientists, Russians who allied themselves with Hitler, rebels from the Baltic states, diplomats who have been arrested and even more prisoners of war. They must all be interrogated, categorized, weighed and measured.
‘Where exactly on the Eastern Front did you serve?’
‘What kind of rocket boosters were you testing?’
‘Are you prepared to work for us now?’
The cells fill up. The anxiety grows. Sometimes, in the mornings, the prisoners throw out a lifeless body when the door is opened. It might be a suicide, or an informant who has been beaten to death. Sometimes, the prisoners throw out their food as well, if they are on hunger strike. There are force-feeding procedures. Aron and another guard push two tubes up the prisoner’s nose, then start pumping in milk. The prisoner can choose whether to suffocate or swallow. They all choose to swallow.
Vlad is in control, but Aron is tired now. He is tired of picking people up, tired of the interrogations, tired of being a guard. He is thirty years old, but often feels as if he were sixty.
The interrogations continue, the transportations continue, the shootings continue. Traitors are shot, deserters are shot, enemies are shot. Russians or foreigners, it makes no difference.
‘Do you know why we put a bullet in the back of their neck?’ Karrek asks late one night, after several glasses of vodka.
Aron and the other guards shake their heads. They’ve never given it any thought; they’ve just done it, year after year, bullet after bullet, even if the first shot wasn’t fatal. Sometimes it took a second bullet when the prisoner was lying down. Sometimes a third. There are rumours that sometimes the sand that was thrown over a body kept on moving.
‘You don’t know?’
‘No.’
‘It’s obvious,’ Karrek says. ‘Because the back of the neck can’t stare at us.’
Gerlof
‘I don’t know how you have the patience,’ John Hagman said.
‘It keeps my hands flexible,’ Gerlof replied.
He was sitting at the table opposite John, concentrating on finishing off the rigging for a clipper, the classic Cutty Sark. It was a fiddly job, using wire hooks and thread and thin yardarms made of toothpicks.
When the very last tiny knot had been tied, he let out a long breath.
‘I don’t really understand it either, John,’ he admitted. ‘And I haven’t even got a customer for this one, I’ve just—’
He was interrupted by the sound of the telephone. He stared at it, then pulled himself together and picked up the receiver.
‘Davidsson.’
‘Good evening,’ a voice said quietly.
Gerlof recognized it; he was more prepared this time. He nodded to John.
‘Good evening, Aron. How are you?’
‘Fine.’
‘I’m not,’ Gerlof said. ‘I’ve been reading a book, a history book about the terrible things that happened in the Soviet Union in the thirties. The Great Terror.’
‘I don’t read books.’
‘But you’re familiar with the Great Terror.’
There was no reply, and Gerlof went on, ‘A million people were executed between 1936 and 1938 alone. Most were shot, according to the book. Others died under torture. A million, Aron, in less than two years.’
Still nothing.
‘What were you doing during those years, Aron? You said you were a soldier, but what did you do?’
‘I obeyed orders,’ the voice said. ‘I fought against Fascism.’
‘But you’re not a soldier any longer, Aron. You can give up now. You can start talking to the Kloss family.’
‘No. There are too many dead.’
‘Not here on the island,’ Gerlof said.
‘Yes. Here, too.’
‘Where?’
The voice seemed to hesitate before answering. ‘On Kloss land.’
The Voices Beyond: (Oland Quartet Series 4) Page 32
